I would recommend these stats:
Str 43
Int 11
Dex 11

And these Skills:
Stealing 50
Lockpicking 49
Anatomy 1

or

Stealing 50
Magery 49
Anatomy 1

A lot of people recommend putting 100% of their stat points into strength, 45/10/10 because thieves have a hard time gaining strength naturally. I differ from the norm on that, but 45/10/10 or 43/11/11 are both still good. I set Int at 11, because you can use the recall spell right away. You will need enough magery or a recall scroll of course, but even if you set your magery at 49 you will not be able to cast recall if your int is at 10 because it uses 11 mana. So if you plan on using magery right away it would be an idea to set your int at 11. If not, no big deal 10 is fine.

Dex I set at 11 for only one reason. Felucca. For people that only play on the trammel side you might not have any idea of what I'm talking about, lol bear with me.

On Trammel there is no dex penalty to move through a person/animal/monster On Felucca it will cost you 10 Dex points to walk through a person (Which happens all the time at Banks, Mage shops, and provisioners). If you only have 10 points of Dex that means you freeze and are unable to move for a few moments until you regain at least 1 dex point. It may not sound like a big deal, but when you're in Felucca trying to get around it is quite annoying. It's a death sentence when your running from town to town and you "push" through a bunch of monsters, or are being chased by PKs. As a thief character one learns not to carry a lot of things, because dyeing is something that happens all the time. Stuff like greater heal potions and armor we almost never carry because it will just be looted from our corpse when we die. Speed is our Number 1 defense against monsters, angry players, and PKs. On felucca I would highly recommend starting at 11 Dex. If you only play in trammel your fine starting at 10.

No matter what you start at your stats will increase as you play, so don't worry if you started with some stats that don't seem to be working out they will go up :)

Now for skills.

Stealing. That is the number one skill you need to put points in when you are starting your character.

In the past stealing was not difficult at all to gain skill with, you and a buddy just went off in the woods and started stealing from each other. Now however that is completely different. In order to steal from another person you need to be a member of the thieves guild In order to do that your character has to be 40 hours old (40 hours spent in game) and you have to have at least 60 Stealing skill. Getting your skill in stealing from 50 to 60 without being able to steal from People... lol Its going to take some time :)

You can still steal from containers and NPCs (On trammel you cant steal from players or NPCs at anytime, from what I hear they have even changed it to where you cant steal from Guildmates on Trammel.) To further compound the amount of time it will take you to raise stealing to 60, most items that will give you skill gain will be heavy, your likely hood of getting caught stealing them is HIGH. So here is how a typical power hour goes:

7pm
*open crate*
*Attempt to steal 5 Lb Hammer*
*(Npc Busy body) Guards Thief!*
*Thou shall regret thy actions swine!*
*Wack*
7:01pm
-You are dead-(You have to wait 2 minutes until a
healer will resurrect you because you are have
been "flagged criminal")
*pets the cat (or dog/fish/mina bird whatever you have)*
7:03
*Ressed! Back to stealing! muhahaha*

7:04
*open crate*
*Attempt to steal 5 Lb Hammer*
*(Npc Hall Monitor) Guards Thief!*
*Thou shalt regret thy actions swine!*
*Bam*
7:05pm
-You are dead-
*gets a soda from the fridge*
7:07
*Ressed! Back to stealing! muhahaha*

7:08 pm
*open crate*
*Attempt to steal 5 Lb Hammer*
*your skill in stealing has gone up .01%*
----Skill Gain Whoo hoo!!! :)----
*(Npc Tattle Tale) Guards Thief!*
*Thou shalt regret thy actions swine!*
*Big metal Hup-a-ju*
7:09pm
-You are dead-
*whistles*.........

The point being is when you are a thief trying to gain skill you will be stealing heavier things and getting caught/guard killed most of the time. Every time you die you have to go find a healer, wait 2 minutes for the criminal flag to wear off, then Resurrect and come back. If the healer is close to where you are stealing from it will be about 3 minutes in between deaths. So your only going to get about 20 tries to gain skill sometimes in a whole Power hour!

Start with as much stealing still as you can because it will take a LONG time to get up to 60 stealing and join the thieves Guild.

Now, I'm certain that their are better ways of gaining stealing, if anyone knows of any Please e-mail or ICQ me! :)

Setting Stealing to 50 is highly recommended for starting.

Now as a secondary skill, Lockpicking is something that I would recommend. In order to open the crates on containers in most NPC shops you will need at least 30 lock picking. (In the Jewelers shop, Guard Posts, and other places its more like 60-70 Lockpicking).

Lockpicking will rise fast enough with a bit of Practice, some other skills you might think of learning would be Magery or Hiding.

Magery is fairly important to get from spawn location to spawn location by recalling. You wont have to have as much magery if you have a good source of recall scrolls and use a rune book. With rune books and their ability to "hold" recall scrolls you no longer have to worry about carrying runes and recall regs only to have them looted when you die. (Rune books are Newbiefied they will stay on you when you Die).

Hiding is not crucial to Town rares hunters, but its nice. It is a very slow skill to raise, if you think your going to want to have a large amount of hiding skill you might consider starting out with it, and training up magery and lock picking.

Lockpicking is fairly easy to raise, I would recommend going to any tinker shop and buying as many single lock picks as they will sell you, then go to an inn or another out of the way place, and start trying to pick the locks on the chests there. -Important- Once you pick the chests in the Inns, it's probably not a good idea to open them, as the Explosions will blow a new (low hit point) character to smithereens in an instant. You should be able to get lock picking from 0 to 60 in 2 to 4 Power hours this way. Just don't open the chests after you pick the locks! :)

Some other skills that are often put on thief characters are Detect Hidden, and Remove Trap. Those are totally up to you if you want them. For just rares hunting, I usually don't bother with either and "suck up" the damage. However if you expand into other things (Chests in Dungeons, or treasure hunting for example) then you might want to train them up. I will go into a little more detail in the "Adventurer rares hunter (out of town)" Chapter.